Kill Fee (5 page)

L
ind returned to Minneapolis on a Delta Airlines A319. It was sunny when the plane landed, early afternoon. Lind barely noticed. He walked off the plane and through the terminal to another gate, where he boarded a Delta regional jet for the quick flight northeast to Duluth.

He walked off the small plane when it touched down in Duluth and found the Liberty counter inside the terminal. Rented a blue Kia Rio and asked for a map of the city, which he studied in the driver’s seat of the Kia outside the terminal. When he’d found his destination, he folded the map closed and drove east from the airport, toward Lake Superior and a quiet, tree-lined street in Congdon Park. It was a posh neighborhood north of the city, the houses large and set back from the road.

The house Lind was looking for was nearly hidden amid the trees that surrounded it. It wasn’t nearly as large as many he’d passed; it looked old
and dark, neglected. Lind drove past the house to the end of the block, parked the Kia around the corner, and waited until he was sure the street was deserted. Then he climbed out of the car and set out through the trees toward the house.

It was quiet in the forest. Very still. Lind’s footsteps cracked twigs and rustled the underbrush. Above him, birds called to one another. A car passed in the distance, unseen. Lind kept walking.

He found the house and crouched in the brush, surveying the building across the vast lawn. There was a car in the driveway, a dented Mercedes, but the house looked empty. There were no signs of life—of potential threats—anywhere.

Lind waited until the birds stopped calling above him. Until the whole forest seemed to forget he was there. He knelt in the brush, and from his pocket removed a pair of black gloves, which he pulled over his hands before crossing the lawn, fast and low, to the house.

The back door was locked. Lind punched out a small window and the glass made a tinkling sound on the carpet. He opened the door from inside and slipped into the house and waited. Heard voices, tinny music: a television somewhere. He crept through the house, room to room.

The television was playing in the living room. There was a man watching from a worn couch. There was an empty plate beside him, a half-empty bottle. The man didn’t hear Lind come into the room.

Lind crept behind the man, quickly, his shoes making whispers on the carpet. He reached down and took the man’s neck in his hands. The man stiffened. He fought. Lind squeezed his neck tighter. The man thrashed on the worn couch, clawing at Lind’s shirt. Lind let him fight.

The man was much older than Lind. He was weaker. He fought, and then he stopped fighting, and when he went still, Lind eased him back down to the couch.

The man’s eyes were wide open and sightless, his mouth wrenched in a last gasp for air. He’d kicked at the table, knocked over the bottle. Its contents had spilled onto the carpet.

Lind waited until he was sure the man was dead. Then he turned and retraced his steps through the house and out onto the lawn. He hurried back through the forest to the little blue Kia, climbed in, and turned the key. Then he stopped. Across the street, in front of a bungalow, a little boy chased a large rubber ball toward the road. The boy caught up to the ball, picked it up. Then he noticed Lind.

Remove yourself from the scene without being detected. Don’t attract undue attention. Secondary objective.

The boy studied Lind intently, and Lind held the boy’s gaze, wondering if he’d have to kill him. Then the boy looked down at the ball. Turned and threw it back toward the bungalow and gave chase, laughing, on stubby legs. Lind watched the boy play until he was sure the kid had forgotten him. Then, slowly, he pulled away from the house.

He drove back to the airport, stopping along the way at a gas station, where he stuffed the gloves and his sweater into a garbage bin, just as he’d been taught. Then he drove the Kia back to the Liberty rental lot, returned the keys to the woman at the counter, and walked into the terminal and through the security checkpoint to the lounge, where he waited to board the next flight to Minneapolis.

P
arkerson was going over last month’s reports with his secretary when he felt his burner phone start to ring. He’d pulled it from his pocket, a cheap pay-as-you-go flip phone, before he realized what he was doing.

Jamie frowned from the door. “Thought you had a BlackBerry.”

“In the shop,” he lied. Flashed the burner phone, rueful. “This is the piece of shit they gave me as a loaner.”

“Phone companies.” Jamie shook her head. “The worst. I’ll leave you alone.” She ducked out of the room, closing the door behind her. Parkerson waited until he heard the lock engage.

Shit,
he thought.
That was close.
He brought the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”

There was a pause. Parkerson could hear breathing. Then: “I’ve completed the assignment.”

Done. Parkerson felt his whole body relax. He stared at his computer and exhaled, long and slow. “Good.”

There was no answer.

“You’re on your way home?”

Another pause. “I’m in transit.”

“Good,” Parkerson said. “Thanks for calling. We’ll be in touch soon.”

“You’re welcome.” Nothing else. The call disconnected. Parkerson put the phone down and leaned back in his chair. Swiveled around until he was staring out his vast picture window at the forest beyond, feeling the tension dissipate.

Parkerson replayed the Saturday phone call in his head and wondered again if the job had been worth the risk. The client had sounded desperate, unhinged. Parkerson hadn’t liked the way his voice had wavered. He’d sounded irrational, barely clinging to sanity. He’d sounded like he was on the verge of making a mess.

Parkerson hated messes. He dealt with numbers, with absolutes. Coordinates. Code. Dollars, in and out. He preferred the cleanliness that numbers offered. The perfection. One or two. Yes or no. Paid or unpaid.

Humanity, with its tendency toward imperfection, made him uncomfortable. The client had purchased a kill. Parkerson had completed the contract. The job should have been over. Finished. No headaches. No messes.

The client, though, was unable to see the contract with Parkerson’s clarity, though he’d shown an appealing lack of remorse when he’d
ordered the kill. Parkerson had no time to deal with remorse, or morality, or any other human imperfection. This was numbers. Money, in and out. A contract fulfilled.

It had personally cost Parkerson to terminate the client. He’d had to allocate his own capital to fly the asset to Duluth, rent the car, finance the kill. Not an insignificant cost, but in the end, a necessary investment. Better to pay up front for security than to risk the program on one man’s crippling weakness. Besides, Parkerson thought with a smile, the client had already paid his fee. The money had been transferred. The numbers made sense.

Parkerson heard his door open behind him. He turned in his chair and saw Jamie peering in at him. “Everything okay?” she asked him.

Parkerson smiled at her, wide, genuine. “Everything’s fine.” He winked at her. “Just some kind of crank.”

W
ell, god damn it.” Windermere threw up her hands. “That was useless.”

She’d just emerged from the airport police department at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International. Stevens and Mathers waited for her in the crowded terminal building. Even from twenty feet away, Stevens could tell his former partner was frustrated. “Dead end?”

Windermere snorted. “They have security tapes for the whole building. Rental car offices to the departure gates.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And we can’t see them. It’s a TSA situation, they said. And the TSA doesn’t want to play nice.”

Mathers shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“We could have full coverage of this guy walking into the airport, dropping off his rental car, and boarding a plane. We could figure out where he landed and work the tapes from his arrival airport as well. Hell, we might get lucky and get another license plate number, or a positive ID. But unless I come correct with TSA approval from on high, boys, we’re not seeing those tapes.”

Stevens scratched his head. “So how do we get TSA approval?”

Windermere sighed. “I don’t know, Stevens,” she said. “Maybe if we write our congressman.”

NOBODY AT THE LIBERTY RENTAL DESK
proved to be of any help, either. “Saturday, right?” the manager said. “Busy day. Heck, they’re all busy. Some brown-haired kid isn’t going to make an impression.”

“The Chevy Aveo.” Windermere read off the license plate. “Who rented it?”

The manager frowned. “Thought you knew this already.”

“Humor me, Bob.”

The manager typed something into his computer. Read it. “Here it is,” he said. “Allen Bryce Salazar. Council Bluffs, Iowa.”

Windermere swapped glances with Stevens. “You ever deal with this guy before? He rent from you guys in the past?”

The manager squinted. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“What about credit card information?”

The manager squinted some more. Leaned down and peered at his screen. “Looks like a corporate card.” He looked up at Windermere. “Triple A Industries. That sound familiar?”

Mathers shook his head. “Salazar calls his company Wrong End Incorporated. I’ve never heard of Triple A before.”

Windermere looked at Mathers. Then she looked at Stevens. Stevens shrugged. “Triple A Industries,” she said finally. “I guess it’ll have to do.”

I
t was dark when Lind landed in Minneapolis. He walked off the plane and through the terminal to the Delta lounge, where he ate three packets of cheese and crackers before he boarded his flight back to Philadelphia.

He sat on board the big Delta airliner and stared at the seat back in front of him, trying to keep from thinking about Showtime and Hang Ten and that big Army C-17 as the plane taxied and took off into the night. Every flight was the same. Every stomach-lurching launch down the runway and every turbulent shuck and jive. If he closed his eyes, he’d be back on that transport plane with the rest of the lucky ones.

There was an older woman in the aisle seat beside him. Lind could feel her eyes on him. He stared at the seat back and tried to ignore her. She kept staring. “Business or pleasure?” she said at last.

Lind exhaled, long, and turned slowly to face her. She was a white-haired woman, mid-sixties or so. She smiled at him, friendly. Lind tried to calm the racing thoughts in his head. Tried to maintain some illusion of normalcy.

“I’m visiting my son,” the woman said. “He’s a doctor, or he will be. He just finished his residency.”

Lind kept the smile pasted to his face. He nodded politely. He’d been trained for situations like this.
Be civil,
the man had told him.
Don’t volunteer information. Extricate yourself from the conversation as quickly as you can.

Lind looked around the airplane. Every seat was full. The canned air
seemed suffocating, the atmosphere unbearable. He wished he were back at his apartment. He wished the man was there to help him.

“He’s a surgeon, my son,” the woman continued. “A general surgeon, but a surgeon nonetheless.” She looked at him. “I bet he’s probably about your age.”

Lind nodded again. He was gripping the armrests tight, so tight he could have wrenched them loose if he’d tried. “My name is Richard O’Brien,” he said at last.

“Glenda.” The woman held out her hand. “Glenda Regis.”

Lind looked at the woman’s hand. He unpeeled his own hand from the armrest and gripped hers. The woman winced a little, but her smile stayed fixed on him. “Nervous flier?”

Lind nodded.

“Why don’t you try sleeping? The time always goes quicker when you’re asleep.”

Lind let go of the woman’s hand and turned to face the seat back in front of him. He could feel her eyes on him, but he didn’t look at her. He stared at the seat back and tried to relax. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Not for me.”

T
riple A Industries,” Mathers told Windermere, “is a joke.”

They were back in the office, having dropped Stevens at his Cherokee and returned to CID to try and hammer out the shooter’s credit card situation. Windermere left Mathers at his computer while she focused on grilling Salazar, who continued to claim innocence.

“I sell fertilizer,” he told her, shadows under his eyes and two days’ stubble on his cheeks. “I never heard of this guy Pyatt before in my life, I told you.”

“Triple A Industries,” said Windermere.

Salazar stared back at her, blank-faced. “Yeah?”

“What do you know about it?”

Salazar sighed and sat back, shaking his head. “I know nothing,” he said. “What do you want me to say? I never heard of it in my life.”

Windermere studied his face for a long time. He wasn’t lying, she decided. There was no way she could prove it, but she was pretty damned sure at this point that Allen Bryce Salazar had nothing to do with Spenser Pyatt’s shooting. Somehow, though, somebody had thrown him into the mix.

Salazar leaned forward and ran his hands through his hair. “My wife,” he said. “I just want to go home.”

“I know,” Windermere told him. “I’m working on it.”

She left the big man in the interview room and walked back out into CID proper. By now it was evening, and the office had mostly cleared out; only Mathers and a few diehards remained at their cubicles. The whole place was quiet.

Mathers looked up from his computer as Windermere approached. “Nothing,” he said. “Triple A Industries is a joke.”

Windermere pulled up a chair. “Explain.”

Mathers gestured to his screen. “I traced the company back. It’s nothing but a P.O. box in Richmond, Virginia. The company itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of a numbered offshore corporation based in the Cayman Islands.”

“So who owns the numbered company?” said Windermere. “We follow the trail long enough, there’s bound to be a person at the end of the line.”

“Yeah,” said Mathers, “except there’s no following any further.” He gestured at his screen again. This time, Windermere turned to look.

The screen was blue. There was a government seal in the background,
a log-in prompt center stage. Windermere blinked. “I don’t get it,” she said.

“Department of Defense,” said Mathers. “Access restricted.”

“You’re saying you traced Triple A to this numbered company, and when you tried to go deeper, the Defense Department stonewalled you?” Windermere stared at the screen. “How does that make any sense?”

Mathers shrugged. “Either the government’s got a stake in Triple A, or someone inside doesn’t want us to look further. Either way, this is some conspiracy-level shit.”

“Essentially, the Defense Department rented our shooter a car. That’s what you’re saying.”

Mathers held up his hands. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s kinda what it looks like.”

“Christ.” Windermere looked around the office, feeling her frustration start to mount. “Nothing’s ever simple in this job, is it?”